Mrs humphry ward wikipedia death

Left: "Mrs Humphry Ward," photograph by H. Walter Barnett. Source: frontispiece of Walters. Right: "Mrs Humphry Ward with some of the children of the settlement.

Mary Augusta Ward CBE (née

Mary Augusta Ward died of heart failure in London on 24 March , after three months' illness, just a day after hearing that she had been granted her honorary LL. She was buried in the churchyard at Aldbury, a short walk from her Hertfordshire country home, Stocks. Her husband, whose recent sudden illness must have added to the strain on her, was too ill to attend but survived her for another six years, and she was also survived by her three children.

The youngest of these, Janet, who had married the eminent historian George Macaulay Trevelyan, grandson of Charles Edward Trevelyan of Wallington in Northumberland, published an affectionate biography of her mother three years later. The day after she died, the Times obituary of Ward acknowledged that "[s]he had lived on into an age indifferent to the controversies and conflicts which were the basis and background of her best works.

Maybe, though only a year or so earlier the outspoken journalist, biographer and politician Stephen Gwynn had professed astonishment that writings with "no pretension to humour or to wit," and lacking "almost entirely the quality of suggesting passion" 7 , should have been so popular, relegating her to the ranks of those whose output was just one step removed "from that uncongenial thing, the 'symposium' in a review" A little later, when Janet wrote her biography, she too acknowledged that there had been a period of relative neglect: It was as though she had lived through the period, some ten years before, when the public had tired somewhat of her books and younger writers had to a large extent supplanted her, until, towards the end, she found herself taken to the heart of her countrymen in a manner that had hardly been her lot in the years of her greatest literary fame.

They loved her not only for all that she had done, but for what she was, divining in her, besides her intellectual gifts, besides even the tenderness and sympathy of her character, that indomitable courage that carried her through to the end, over difficulties and obstacles at which they only dimly guessed. They loved her for wearing herself out, at sixty-seven, in visits to the battle-fields of France, that she might bear her witness to her country's deeds; they loved her for all the joy that she had given to little children.

Two months before her death the Lord Chancellor, making himself the mouthpiece of this feeling, had asked her to act as one of the first seven women magistrates of England, and later still, when she was already nearing the end, the University of Edinburgh invited her to receive the Honorary Degree of LL. These acts of recognition gave her a passing pleasure, and when she herself was beyond the reach of pleasure, or of pain, it stirred the hearts of those who went with her, for the last time, to the little village graveyard to see awaiting her, at the drive gate, a file of stalwart police, claiming their right to escort the coffin of a Justice of the Peace.

Trevelyan, Ch.